“There’s no reason they should stop it,” he said, when so many communities have faced wildfire and other calamities for so long. In a phone interview, Mitch Landrieu, senior adviser to the president and coordinator of infrastructure projects, told The Arizona Republic that Inflation Reduction Act funds will keep flowing to projects like this unless Congress decides to pull that funding. “My entire career I’ve talked about, ‘What if?’” he said. The San Carlos program is among 134 high-priority fire zones the agency has identified, he said, and the legislation making billions of dollars available has for the first time made it possible to imagine treating them all over the next decade. “We’ve got to leave something for those that we love.” 'That day as finally come'įorest Service Chief Randy Moore attended the event at a guest ranch below cliffs along the Salt River. “We can’t be greedy in our time,” he said. Forest thinning will help preserve oaks that provide acorns, which the 17,000 residents consider a dietary staple. At a news conference that the Forest Service arranged near Saguaro Lake on Thursday, he thanked the Biden administration for the funds and said they will help preserve not just the reservation’s ecology but the tribe’s culture. The tribe is building a lumber mill that will use thinned trees as a way to help its long-term management goals, Tribal Chairman Terry Rambler said. A portion of the zone reaches to the south side of Roosevelt Lake, in the watershed SRP uses to serve customers around Phoenix.Ī secondary goal is to help the San Carlos Apache Tribe staff up so it can work across more of the 3 million acre zone, according to materials the Forest Service published for the announcement. Other partners working to restore the forest lands include the Arizona Department of Game and Fish, the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management, and SRP. Part of the project will minimize the risk of a fire that could rage up Mount Graham, threatening an international telescope observatory, telecommunications installations, and an endangered endemic red squirrel species. The work is intended to protect communities, the environment, cultural resources and regional water supplies. The Forest Service will treat another 87,000 acres on neighboring tracts of the Tonto and Apache-Sitgreaves national forests, and south of the reservation in the mixed-conifer forests of the Pinaleño Mountains of the Coronado National Forest. Those areas near the Mogollon Rim have grown dense with ponderosa pines. The tribe will use the funds to treat 100,000 acres on the reservation, mostly on its northwestern and eastern flanks. The San Carlos partnership will work across 3 million acres, including tribal and national forest lands in and around the San Carlos Reservation east of Phoenix. Protecting communities, cultural resources Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, whose department includes the U.S. The fear of more such fires across the West as the climate warms and dries has made fuel reduction an urgent priority. Within Arizona since the turn of the 21st century, two megafires burned across more than a million acres. That reservoir is a major water supplier for Payson, and also holds some water that flows to the Verde River and customers in metro Phoenix.īetween the two spending bills, the administration has dedicated more than $3 billion to reducing the rising risk of catastrophic wildfires across eight states. The announcement follows on last year’s pledge of Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funds to expedite forest health work in northern Arizona’s Four Forest Restoration Initiative and Salt River Project’s watershed protection program around Cragin Reservoir. In all, the government announced new commitments of $490 million. The San Carlos program is among 11 Western landscapes chosen to receive funding from the Inflation Reduction Act this year. The federal government will pump $32 million into a partnership with the San Carlos Apache Tribe this year to thin forests and reduce wildfire risks in eastern Arizona over the next five years, the Biden administration announced on Thursday.
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